She sits on a rock gazing into the hollow, and in her eyes flashes the story of not one but two lives. A true survivor herself, she hails from a place where her sisters’ voices once resounded in the marshy meadows, but in the now quiet grasses she remains restfully as of the type whom the spotlight seldom spots, the doters rarely seek and the seekers rarely find. When met with fortuitously, she will not pour her heart out at a private tête-à-tête as hypnotic stripes that turn the landscape into a warp hide her struggle that entails the loss of a legendary mother at the equivalent of an age when the only attributable quality of even the most finely destined of men would be rank helplessness.

But the steely gaze reveals a plucky character who awakens us to yet another facet of the utterly magical lives of tigers, of which man, who wears his crown of accomplishments heavily on a buoyant head, is yet to scratch the surface. It tells of a phenomenon, of a revelation, of a tigress giving solace and companionship at a time of another tiger’s crisis, when, embattled by his parents’ hostility and unveiled signals of rejection and eviction, Kallu would frequently revel in her company for succour before the liaison flowered into romance and procreation.